The Ideological Train to Globalization: Bong Joon-Ho's the Host and Snowpiercer
2016; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2014) is the culmination of the filmmaker's fascination with and signification of America in relation to South Korea. Throughout his esteemed body of work, Bong's films dealt with the pervasiveness of the American empire in a series of diverse ways. In his first feature-length film, of Murder (2003), the United States plays a pivotal role in identifying, or misidentifying, the perpetrator of a series of serial murders. His second film, The Host (2006) represents an ideological pivot towards the American film genre grammar, themes, and photography. Snowpiercer, Joon's most recent film, with its American actors, Hollywood-level budget, and English as its standard language, ultimately concludes that transition. Christina Klein has contended that Bong's relationship with America is ambivalent, (1) a term that is often used to describe Korean cinema's relationship with the United States. While of Murder suggested a stark degree of ambivalence, Snowpiercer is utterly saturated with the cultural residue of American cinema, specifically the Blockbuster film. Klein persuasively argues, in 2008, that Bong's relationship with Hollywood was troubled and that he manipulated typical genre tropes to approximate a certain unique Korean-ness in most of his films. This argument may be ably demonstrated by the oafish depiction of specific Korean characters and the brazenness of the Americans in Bong's The Host. Even though Bong uses American blockbuster film tropes to approximate and articulate Korean-ness, Snowpiercer represents the filmmaker's pivot toward subverting, rather than emulating, Hollywood's filmic language; The Host's genre-redefining moments are all but absent from his latest film. A cultural materialist analysis would indicate that Bong attempts to create a trans-national film vocabulary with Snowpiercer, subsequently separating himself from both Korean and American film history in a peculiar hybrid form that uniquely merges both styles. Bong Joon-ho's career is inextricably intertwined with the history of Korean national Klein has argued that Bong's films have substantive roots in the Korean Golden Age cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. (2) Applying the auteur theory to Bong's films perhaps ignores the cultural materialist processes innate within the filmmaking practice, which has been so often dominated by American Blockbuster International cultural legibility requires that certain filmmakers adopt American hegemonic film tropes to articulate their creative ambitions in a more universalized fashion. This assertion is particularly true in the case of Snowpiercer. However, tracing back to of Murder, this film is most assuredly situated within a South Korean nationalist discourse in relation to American Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's article of Memories (2011) articulates an argument similar to the one in reference to Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003). Both Bong's and Park's respective films deliberately set out to manage and subvert the national discourse surrounding the way memory operates. This tension resonates with Klein's assertion that Bong's films, specifically The Host, owe a particular debt to the historical continuity of Korean cinema. (3) In terms of craftsmanship and filmmaking standards, Bong's films ignored the limitations typically attributed to a foreign film's ability to compete with--critically, at least--the American hegemonic standard. His accomplishments are therefore situated in a national imaginary but, with the advent of Snowpiercer, he has extricated himself from the Korean national approach and entered into a liminal space with no assured or concrete discursive formula. Snowpiercer is thus neither an American film nor a Korean film. It operates in a trans-national discourse that makes it culturally illegible to both American and Korean audiences. Conversely, The Host's critical and cultural legibility is contingent upon its debt to Korean film, national tensions, and the primacy of its genre subversion. …
Referência(s)